Poseidon
by mysticlake
Summary: This isn’t your fault, they tell him. Hotch oneshot, spoilers for season 5. Rated M for adult themes.


_I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each._

_I do not think that they will sing to me._

//

_This isn't your fault_.

They tell him this time and time again. The team, the doctors, the psychiatrist. They repeat is so often that he can almost pinpoint when one of them is going to say it again. The slightly tilted head and mouth pursed with sympathy are dead giveaways, road signs that signal "CAUTION: PITY MIXED WITH GUILT AHEAD." Dave's taken to checking in on him at all hours under the guise of bringing him coffee, and he says it in some subtle form every time. The shrink…the shrink doesn't bother with subtlety and says it straight out. That's almost preferable, really, to Dave's under-the-rug therapy. He doesn't even know why he bothers with his appointments, but Dave and Morgan insisted. It's easier just to go than to argue, so every Tuesday he sits on the couch for an hour and stares at his hands. Running his fingers over his shooting calluses. Remembering the narrow strip of pale skin on his ring finger that he had when he finally took his wedding ring off after the divorce.

That's gone by now, of course.

He's so goddamn sick of the words that he wants to stop them before they speak, but he can tell that saying it makes them feel better, if only momentarily. So he keeps quiet. He wonders how many rape victims he's spoken to in the last few years. Fifty? A hundred? More? And the exact same words came out of his mouth every time. At least they were true for those victims, no matter how hollow they sounded. Those victims were victims in the true sense of the word – defenseless, trapped, innocent. He's not a victim, no matter how much Foyet would like him to be.

//

It wasn't rape, not literally. In some ways, though, it would've been so much easier if it had been. No ambiguity that way. He could call himself a victim, profile himself. Profile Foyet. He can't profile the sheer feeling of violation when nothing actually happened. Reid says over and over again that Foyet gets off on control, and that's true. But this wasn't control. He doesn't know what it was, but it wasn't control. Control is clean and orderly, simple. It was far too filthy for that.

//

He floats through his days now, buoyed along by an almost fickle anger coupled with numbness. Right after Jack left, he thought for sure that the fury would consume him. All the filters he had built up over the years would break down and the emotion would rush in. Yet he was wrong: like the sea, it ebbs and flows. It seeps from the corners at the most unexpected times. He snaps at Garcia, the words slapping her before he can stop them. He is jittery all the time, on edge, constantly drinking coffee and sleeping too little. The only pictures in his apartment now are from case files. He can't see his son; why should anyone else be able to, even if only in a photo? He locks his door three times a night. Classic PTSD, of course – he practically wrote the textbook on that – but it's an easy trap to fall into, and somehow the fact that he fits the profile that he knows so well is liberating. Foyet wants to change his mind about profiling? He'll have a hard time changing _that_ profile.

Gideon's name has come up more than a few times, both in the office and in his own mind. In reality, he knows there's no way he'd ever leave like Jason did. He can't catch Foyet on his own, not without more murders. So he pores over case files at night instead of sleeping or drinking, reading the words again and again until he can simply sink through the misery into a killer's mind and replay every murder like a movie. Foyet owns him then, and the montage of blood and gore becomes tedious. He considers getting a photo of Foyet blown up at the copy shop just so he can hang it on the wall to memorize every detail of that face. The profile is solid and he knows it better than anyone, but he wants to know the face. It makes the killing fantasies that much more real. Makes them better.

He stops drinking, too. Alcohol just makes his memory fuzzier, which typically has appeal for him, but he wants every detail to maintain its painful clarity. If he's complacent or overwhelmed when he finds him, the kill will be too quick. He isn't going to torture him – that's not his job – but he wants to relish it. Taste it in his mouth, the rush of perfectly controlled annihilation. In clichéd fashion, he tells himself one shot is all he's going to need. He's not stupid; he'll have extra bullets. But ideally, it'll be one shot, quick and clean, hands steady on the gun and then quickly to the jugular to check for a pulse. It will be controlled.

//

Prentiss starts to follow him around, bringing him to and from work, dropping in with coffee and bagels, and there may be something more there, although neither of them will pursue it right now. He doesn't want a relationship now, as he's tied to this case in too many dark, ugly ways for the possibility of devotion to someone else. Maybe she's hoping to serve as a surrogate family or to try to fix thing in her way; he doesn't know. It doesn't matter, anyway. He hasn't even had an erection that was unrelated to Foyet since the attack, which has a nice twisted logic to it. The only thing that gets him off now is seeing that one shot – perversely, they both get off on the destruction of each other.

//

Suicide isn't really an option, as much as Morgan suspects it is. He's been close to death too many times for it to hold any appeal for him. Every time he fears for his life he thinks of his son and how much he wants to see him one more time: He clings to the idea of seeing Jack again, no matter how slim the hope. Erasing that chance permanently isn't fair to his son. He can't leave Jack with the memory of a battered man in a hospital bed. Foyet wins that way. He would rather spend the rest of his life apologizing to Jack from a distance than never saying another word.

//

He drives to Virginia Beach one wild, blustery Sunday to watch the waves crash in a furious symphony with each other, sitting there in his suit until the sun goes down and it hurts too much to think anymore. He remembers how he and Haley used to take Jack here for long weekends – and before that, in the early days of marriage, when they would sneak away from work early on Fridays to get drunk and make messy, wonderful love on the beach after the bars closed.

He closes his eyes and Foyet is there waiting for him again. He drops the brandy glass and the gun goes off. They struggle. And now he is on the ground, and Foyet is straddling him. The rest…is unnecessary. It isn't control.

//

_This isn't your fault_, they tell him. But it is, in ways too fragile to number.

//

_I'm sorry. I took away his childhood. I'm so sorry._

_I guarded my heart, and Foyet smashed it in one blow._

_Let me show you the fragments. They're right here, clenched in my hand like sea glass. Look at this scarred palm._

//

_I have seen them riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black.  
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown._

**A/N: I want to apologize for my long absence. A lot of things started happening at once in my life, and I had to take some serious time off from writing to get it all worked out. Thanks for the patience. I don't know when **_**Blood**_** will be updated again, but this standalone one-shot kept bouncing around in my mind after the premiere. I actually had about ten pages of my notebook filled with material for this one 1,300 word story. **

**The quotes at the beginning and end are from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."**

**-- mysticlake**


End file.
